February 06, 2012

More Live Blogging from the Archives

Last week I wrote about a charming vignette from William Henry Holcombe's diary, about one of Holcombe's uncles who drafted a will for a client (later his wife). Now I want to talk about a more serious topic -- his parents' antislavery action. Because of his mother's growing antislavery beliefs, the family freed the sixteen human beings they owned. Still, Holcombe's mother had growing qualms about living in a slave state. The final push came "when a childless old uncle deposited a will in bank leaving her children two plantations and eighty negroes." Mrs. Holcombe then "declared the crisis had come and my father, to the amazement of all his friends, sold out, surrendered the most scared ties of his being, sacrificed apparently his best interests, and took al his family, except my oldest brother who had just married, to Indiana."

This is a decision many people made in the South in the years leading into Civil War; what's of particular interest to me is that though they were anti-slavery and took serious action against the institution, their son James P. Holcombe became one of the leading defenders of slavery in 1850s -- and spoke powerfully in favor of secession in the Virginia legislature in March 1861. That's quite a difference between the generations; but it's a move we hear a lot about in the 1850s, as young Virginians became substantially more conservative than their parents. Peter Carmichael's fabulous book The Last Generation details this important shift.

What I want to focus on in particular is William Henry's description of the family's conflict with an uncle who prepared a will leaving two plantations and eighty human beings to them. Don't you love how he mentioned that a will had been deposited in a bank? Never ceases to surprise me how we can pick up little details of life (and legal culture) from scraps of writing. Anyway; William Henry described his mother's conflict with her uncle and her effort to get him to change his will:

From their new home, where all were free, this worthy couple opened epistolary fires upon the childless old uncle who had been left behind in a state of great disgust and indignation. They besought him to change his will to liberate all the slaves, and to leave them all his property, so that they could be comfortably established in some western community. The old gentleman responded with great bitterness, denouncing their infatuation and folly, but when he died a few years afterwards, his will was found to have been made in exact accordance with my mother’s wishes, and the negroes obtained their liberty and property, without having the slightest knowledge of the sacrifices and efforts of their real benefactors.